Gordon Mursell. English Spirituality from 1700 to the Present Day. Louisville KY: Westminster, 2001. Print.

English Spirituality from 1700 to the Present Day is a history of Christian teaching and experience in England in the last 300 years. It focuses on various movements and individuals to come up with a fascinating and well-researched overview. It is very helpful to anyone interested in English literature and history as well as the theology. Paul Jehle calls literature the handmaid to history. If that is so, then religion is the mistress of both.

Mursell devotes chapters the people and movements emphasizing their beliefs and how they fit in with what was going on in Christianity as a whole, not just the Anglican Church.

The first of three major divisions describes the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It tells of reform movements like the Great Awakening and Methodism. The author pulls out important writings and sermons by Whitefield and the Wesleys as well as opponents to Christianity like Gibbon. He notes the mainline Anglican and Catholic approaches as well. He includes Dissenters like Defoe and a number of other well-known writers.

He does a direct and honest study of Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example. He puts William Blake among the orthodox believers, something I was surprised at since Blake seems to known for his syncretism. After all, one of his collections is called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Mursell makes a case that Blake, while taking artistic license, was at his core still a Christian.

William Law is still read and cited in some circles today. Perhaps it was the author’s choice of selections, but most the quotations from Law made him sound legalistic and even angry. The contrast with Isaac Watts could not have been stronger. If one were to read just the dozen or so pages on Watts, he would be edified. That was the most uplifting chapter of the entire book. Although best known for his hymns, Watts wrote other things as well, and love of God and the joy of salvation in Jesus shines through all his works cited here.

The section on the Victorian era may be most helpful for the student of literature. Many of the issues and controversies in the church and the culture are reflected in the literature of the time. The treatment of Dickens and George Eliot are especially helpful for literary study and to illustrate the cultural changes of the period.

Although I have read little of Cardinal Newman, I recall being taught that he was a mighty force for orthodoxy in nineteenth-century England: that without him England would have fallen away entirely. I was therefore disappointed in the chapter on Newman. He seemed pretty ordinary and not especially inspiring. However, the chapter on his disciple Gerard Manley Hopkins provided a lot of understanding into that poet’s life and works.

English Spirituality from 1700 to the Present Day shares many perspectives from this time from the Nonconformists like Darby and the Irvingites to Unitarians. In all cases the book keeps a narrative thread but lets the people speak for themselves. Among all this variety, the treatment appears fair and evenhanded.

The section on the twentieth century is entitled “Losing our Absolute,” an appropriate choice of words. Here Mursell sometimes uses the term spirituality very loosely, but in a manner that many contemporaries do use it. Still, he discusses writers and speakers who point to the “older ways” like Chesterton, Lewis, and Sayers.

In England it appears that Pentecostalism was largely a phenomenon among Blacks. And the book points out the trends among the skeptics in the church—those who belong to and even ordained, especially Anglicans and Catholics, who really do not take the Scriptures seriously or, at best, choose the parts they like. So he notes feminists, anti-war activists, the effects of psychology, and the like.

While not light reading, this is a great book for background and for helping us understand England and, to a great degree, the English-speaking world. Of all the authors, speakers, and clergy represented, I was most familiar with Coleridge, having done my college thesis on him and having read him pretty widely. Mursell does a more than adequate study on Coleridge and presents his life and ideas fairly and accurately. That gave me confidence that his take on others would be fair and accurate.

He wraps us his chapters on Blake and Coleridge with a quotation from Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection which brought back memories of my college studies and which I would learn a few years later is precise and true:

Christianity ‘is not a Theory, or a Speculation; but a Life…TRY IT!’ (60, emphases in original)

Walker Percy. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar, 1983. Print.

Carlo Rovelli. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. New York: Penguin, 2016. Print.

I read a Walker Percy novel years ago, got a little kick out of it, but never ready anything else by him until a friend gave me Lost in the Cosmos. It is actually listed as nonfiction, and I suppose it is, but there are so many entertaining hypothetical questions in the “questionnaire” portion of the “self-help” material, that it borders on fiction. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Percy wisely and cleverly deals with the contemporary Western identity crisis which, if anything, has gotten more pronounced since he wrote in 1983.

I am mostly going to let Percy speak for himself. He notes that the human being “is the only alien creature, as far as we know, in the entire Cosmos.” (2) Percy uses that word rather than universe or creation because he has fun at the expense of Carl Sagan who used that word in his television show and his books.

He notes many funny things about human behavior as he asks twenty “self-help” questions—many based on complicated scenarios, such as imagining you have just returned to earth after a 400-year near light-speed space voyage—in 260 pages. Like many others, he is aware that people want to learn about things, yet it seems that they feel like they do not belong anywhere. He notes that it appears people wonder “why the autonomous self feels so alone in the cosmos” and “want to believe that chimps and dolphins and whales can speak.” The feeling is, of course, if we could figure out how to converse with other animals (not that it truly is possible), then we would not feel so alone. We make great technical achievements, but also make great messes of the world and of our lives.

Because man is a lonely and troubled species, who does not know who he is or what to do with himself, feeling himself somehow different from other creatures, both superior and inferior—superior because, after all, he studies other animals and writes scientific articles about them, and other animals don’t study him; inferior because he is not a very good animal, is often stupid, irrational, and self-destructive—and solitary in the Cosmos, like Robinson Crusoe marooned on an island populated by goats. Therefore, he would like to discover his place in the Cosmos, discover a man Friday, or, failing that, at least teach goats to talk. (169)

He really points out how foolish materialistic thinking is, yet how so much of the so-called elite like politicians, scientists, and doctors of all kinds take it for granted.

The following incident occurred at Harvard University, presumably a citadel of objective knowledge. I quote from an article by Charles Krauthammer (The New Republic, July 25, 1981): “Several years ago the great Australian neurobiologist, Sir John Eccles, ended a Harvard lecture on brain organization by admitting that although evolution could account for the brain, it could not, in his view, account for the mind, with its mysterious capacity for consciousness and thought: only something transcendent could account for that. The audience began hissing.”

The anomaly lies in the fact that Harvard audiences presumably endowed with mind, consciousness, and thought, and presumably with more intellectual curiosity than most, might have been expected to welcome the views of a famous neurobiologist on the subject—particularly in view of the failure of academic psychology to even address itself to these matters. (166)

A few of notes on this. First, of course, it does illustrate the desire for a merely material explanation for all existence especially among the elite. Why? No accountability. Second, it has been standard practice at Harvard, except among the real radicals who act ugly, to hiss when they dislike or disagree with a lecturer. Third, I can easily imagine Dr. Eben Alexander back in the late seventies or early eighties in such an audience and roundly hissing himself. However, now he knows there is more. He had all kinds of experiences with vivid consciousness for a week when his brain had flatlined.

Four, while there are some Harvard students who are interested in objective inquiry, it is remarkable how many want to use whatever education they acquire to confirm or justify what they already do or believe. As a Harvard graduate myself, I acknowledge the truth in the saying, “You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.” (Originally attributed to a president of Yale, who else?)

While Percy apparently got more out of Carl Sagan than I did, he has a very cogent critique of his approach to life in the real world. Much of Lost in the Cosmos is a humorous send-off to materialistic philosophies (he uses the word scientism).

Sagan’s book [Cosmos] gave me much pleasure, a pleasure which was not diminished, (perhaps even increased) by Sagan’s unmalicious, even innocent scientism, the likes of which I have not encountered since the standard bull sessions of high school and college—up to but not past the sophomore year. (201n.)

I had to laugh at that. I think the last time I actually heard someone assert to me that our minds were merely electrical impulses and mere physical response to stimuli—no different from, say, a cue ball breaking up a rack of balls on a pool table—was in such a college bull session. There is no will, free or otherwise. I do not recall whether I was a freshman or sophomore, but it was no older than that. Percy nailed it.

Of course I have read such stuff from time to time since then like I. A. Richards’ interpretation of art or Dr. Alexander’s beliefs before his near death experience. Tom Stoppard has a lot of fun with this in his Arcadia when, among other things, one character asks, “Is God a Newtonian,” and another character goes mad trying to come up with the mathematical formula that will predict the future. Richard Feynman is reported to have said, “You can predict anything if you have enough facts.” But perhaps Samuel Johnson has the last word: “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.”

Percy continues:

So much for the likes of Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Grosseteste. So much for the science historian A. C. Crombie who wrote: “The natural philosophers of Latin Christendom in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries created the experimental science characteristic of modern times.”

So much, indeed, for the relationship between Christianity and science and that fact that, as Whitehead pointed out, it is no coincidence that science sprang not from Ionian metaphysics, not from the Brahmin-Buddhist-Taoist East, but from the heart of the Christian West, that although Galileo fell out with the Church, he would hardly have taken so much trouble studying Jupiter and dropping objects from towers if reality and value and order of things had not first been conferred by belief in the incarnation.

Yet one is not offended by Sagan. There is too little malice and too much ignorance. (201,202n.)

Percy notes that once priests were the spokesmen for understanding life, then it was the artists, now it is the scientists. Still, he would say that we need all three. Scientists understand things, artists understand people, and true priests understand God.

Amazingly, the very next book I read, Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, actually believes that sophomore bull session stuff! Is this a coincidence or what? Will Rovelli have a TV show on PBS?

First of all, while I really did appreciate what Rovelli was trying to do, in all honesty the book is not seven lessons on physics. There are five lessons on physics, one metaphysical speculation, and one sophomore bull session.

Lesson 1 summarizes relativity, especially as it relates to gravity. Like electromagnetic forces, gravity is a field, and its field is space. “Planets circle around the sun and things fall because space curves.” (8) Gravitational waves exist. Space bends around large objects like stars. The more gravity, the slower time passes. The closer to the speed of light, the slower time passes. A very nice summary for a poor layman like me.

Lesson 2 summarizes quantum theory, first by defining a quanta as “packets or lumps of energy.” Quanta like electrons can only take on certain values. When an electron jumps to another orbital (a “quantum leap”) it either releases or absorbs a photon.

Quantum theory also posits the idea that electrons and other quantum particles only exist when interacting with something else. “An electron is a set of jumps from one interaction to another.” (17) Measuring quanta, then, is an exercise in probability. “It is not possible to predict where an electron will reappear but only to calculate that it will pop up here or there.” (18)

Rovelli says that Einstein accepted this concept for what it was but really did not like it. He wanted to believe “that there was an objective reality independent of whoever reacts with whatever.” (19) Rovelli notes that quantum theory says Einstein was wrong about that, yet, ironically, that is precisely what Rovelli asserts in his last “lesson.” Percy says that Sagan says science is self-correcting. Which Rovelli self should we accept?

Lesson 3 The big bang. The universe is made up of millions of galaxies each made up of millions of stars, and most stars have planets. Since the universe appears to be expanding in nearly all directions, Rovelli tells us “The universe began as a small ball and then expanded to its present cosmic dimensions.” (30) This, of course, is theory—and frankly different from what Sagan believed. Though it does present some nice pictures from the Hubble telescope, this is not so much a lesson as a metaphysical speculation. Rovelli gets even more speculative when he hypothesizes that the universe could have contracted like a black hole and then expanded again over and over. I am not sure how that jibes with entropy.

However, if we put lesson one and the less speculative part of lesson three together, we get the hypothesis presented in Starlight and Time. That is, the outer limits of the universe where there is little gravity may be millions of years old, but near the center where the gravity was intense, it may have only been a few days because of time’s relativity with respect to both gravity and light. Interesting.

And it seems that the believers in scientism want it both ways: relative time when it suits their theories but absolute time when they mock Genesis.

Lesson 4 is about quarks. These are even tinier particles that make up neutrons and protons which are held together by gluons. He notes that about 10 such particles make up all of our known reality, both matter and energy. The particles are not so much like small pebbles but quanta of corresponding fields or motion. They are “Miniscule moving wavelets” that “disappear and reappear” and are a “jump from one interaction to another.” (32,33)

Even in empty space with no matter, there is “a minute swarming of these particles.” (33) The mathematical model that appears to work using certain constants and symmetries require “nonsensical predictions where each calculated quantity turns out to be infinitely large.” (34) He does not mention it, but I suspect that is where the 11 dimensional mathematics of string theory first comes in.

Lesson 5 is about string theory, what the translators here call loop theory. Relativity and quantum mechanics both work but “the two theories cannot be right… because they contradict each other.” (40) Relativity tells us “the world is a curved space where everything is continuous” while quantum theory tells us “it is a flat space where quanta of energy leap.” I seem to recall Brian Greene calling these flat slices of space membranes, or branes for short.(40)

Scientists have searched for a theoretical set of equations that works for both. Einstein did this in relativity by resolving the apparent differences between electromagnetism and mechanics. Now they hope loop or string theory will do this for quantum and gravitational mechanics.

Loop theory states that space is not continuous, not infinitely divisible, but is a collection of minute grains of space “ a billion billion times smaller than the smallest atomic nuclei.” (41) They form the “texture of space.” They technically are nowhere because “they are themselves space.” (43)

It is interesting to note that equations describing space no longer contain a variable for time. The quantum relationships appear to be “the source of time.” (44)

Hypothetically, a star becomes a black hole but when it gets to a certain small size, it begins to expand again.

Lesson 6 notes that heat is motion. Heat moves from hot to cold and time is involved. In all but the most frictionless movements, the motion can only go one way. We actually determine time by loss of energy. This is not absolute, but based on probability like quantum mechanics. It is like predicting the weather (weather itself, I suppose, is heat exchange on a continental scale) or predicting the exact path of a blown up balloon that has been released to allow the air to escape quickly. We cannot predict what will happen exactly, but we can get an “optimum probability.”

Einstein wrote: “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present, and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.” (60)

This gets us back to entropy. That ultimately means, of course that the cosmos had a beginning and will have an end. Even if the universe came from a black hole-big bang cycle, it could not do that indefinitely. Rovelli comes close to the same trap that Percy caught Sagan in: If the cosmos is all there is and all there ever was, how did it begin? Since it is constantly losing heat, it must have had a beginning.

What happened before the beginning? How did it start? To Percy—and to many of the greatest minds in history—this sounds an awful lot like a Prime Mover.

This also get me thinking about time. If time is really a way of describing entropy, the running down of the universe, then what is eternity? Eternity is timeless (and presumably perfect) because there is no heat loss. Indeed one can look at Einstein’s famous E=mc² for support. The letter c in the equation stands for the speed of light. Speed is distance over time (in this case miles or kilometers per second). Eternity is timeless, so we can say that any rate in eternity is distance divided by zero, i.e. no time. Dividing by zero means two things: (1) nonsense or (2) infinity. So either eternity is nonsense, or eternity has infinite energy, hence, the power to create and without entropy.

Why did Percy put an emphasis on the Incarnation above? The eternal God became man. He entered time, but also proved the existence of eternity by reversing entropy through his miracles and demonstrating life after death by rising from the dead.

Alas, Rovelli suggests something very different and, ultimately, quite bleak. In Percy’s words, making us feel like the only aliens in the cosmos.

If Lesson 3 is just barely a physics lesson, then Lesson 7 is not a physics lesson at all. There is nothing about physics here. Indeed, it is exactly like the college sophomore (sophomoric?) bull session that Percy wrote about. I could not believe I read these two books in the same week!

The author, in spite of claiming to have gone beyond Newtonian physics, looks at the brain as a mere machine. He clearly has not contemplated Lost in the Cosmos, read testimony like Proof of Heaven, or ever listened to Sir John Eccles. No, he claims, “an individual is a process: complex, tightly integrated.” (73) When we say human behavior is unpredictable, it is only because our neural networks “are too complex to be predicted.” (74)

I guess it is like chaos theory predicting tornadoes. We are pretty good at predicting the weather in general, but tornadoes are still too complicated, though we are getting better at it. It is not even a matter of free will. Just like that guy in the college bull session, Rovelli suggests there is no such thing as will at all.

There is nothing new under the sun with this. Roger Chillingworth, the evil scientist in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, believed in God in his younger days, but now just saw the world and even human beings as mere machines. Hawthorne says of such scientists:

In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more subtile faculties of such men were materialised, and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself. (Hawthorne ch. 9)

Like Roger Chillingworth, materialists such as Sagan and Rovelli appreciate the art or artistry of the universe, but fail to see how it points to eternity, and ultimately, to an artist.

Percy says we are “lost in the cosmos.” We know we belong somewhere else or someplace better. We know we have messed up. He believes the God of Judaism and Protestant and Catholic Christianity has the answer. To him Catholicism is the best interpretation of the answer. Ecclesiastes says that God “has put eternity into the hearts of men.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) There has got to be something more.

Rovelli notes that while we may have a desire for life, there is no afterlife. We are not lost. “We are home.” (79) It is his variation of Sagan’s “The Cosmos is all there is and all there ever was.” If he were not personally so interested in discoveries about physics, it would be very depressing. If you skip lesson seven, you miss very little unless you like those college bull sessions.

The cosmos is a lovely home in many ways, but most of us would agree with Percy that we have made a mess of it. But these wonders that Rovelli describes so well in the five true physics lessons point to something more.

Newton wrote in his Principia:

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being…This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of His dominion he is wont to be called Lord God pantokrator, Universal Ruler… And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and, from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not eternity or infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures for ever, and is every where present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes duration and space. (Newton III.504,505)

Like Percy, Gerard M. Hopkins would note that man now ignores God in creation to his own sense of alienation. Why?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
     And all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil;

Like the primal curse, man has busily made things unnatural. Nevertheless, Hopkins goes on:

     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
     O, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
     World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
                    (“Pied Beauty” cf. Psalm 68:13 NIV)

---

P.S. One possible quibble that some people would have with Rovelli is that he assumes dark matter exists. I am skeptical. Dark matter was first hypothesized to explain the anomaly with Mercury’s orbit. The other hypothesis, of course, was that there was another planet that always had its dark side towards earth and never transited the sun. The hypothetical planet was named Vulcan, most notable today for its use in Star Trek as the birthplace of Mr. Spock.

Einstein proved that neither hypothesis was necessary. He first proved it mathematically by assuming a fourth dimension, and then his theory of relativity was proven experientially when there was a solar eclipse. Rovelli discusses this confirmation of relativity briefly without mentioning dark matter in this context.

A better name for dark matter would be invisible matter. It supposedly makes up ninety percent of the mass of galaxies, yet it undetectable. At least the hypothesized amount of dark matter near the sun was no more than the mass of a small planet. Perhaps physicists should take a hint from mathematics. When mathematicians acknowledged that square roots of negative numbers do not exist but hypothesized their existence anyhow, they called them imaginary numbers. They should call it imaginary matter.

To me, it looks like we are simply waiting for another Einstein, and likely another dimension to solve the problem. Indeed, Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom has an alternative model that explains galactic rotation without any invisible dark matter. His hypothesis includes a fifth dimension and may be impossible to prove one way or the other with current technology, but the math works without any hypothetical (imaginary?) extra mass.

Anthony Hope. The Prisoner of Zenda. 1894; Amazon Digital Services, 17 May 2012. Ebook.
———. Rupert of Hentzau. 1895; Amazon Digital Services, 12 May 2012. Ebook.

Do you want to have simple, plain, sheer fun reading a book? Check out The Prisoner of Zenda. It has it all. As they used to say in the sixties: What a blast!

Having recently read a group of Victorian adventure stories, what with Sherlock Holmes, Doyle’s Tales of Terror and Mystery, Haggard’s novels, and even 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea all in the last month or so—it was only a matter of time that I would pick up Zenda.

Doyle tips his hat to Zenda. In his Holmes story “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” he tells of someone sailing on the ocean liner Ruritania. Yes, it sounds like Lusitania, but it alludes to Ruritania, the fictional kingdom where the Castle of Zenda is located. Holmes’ client, by the way, is an Austrian baron of a questionable reputation like the Black Duke Michael in Zenda or Rupert of Hentzau in its sequel.

The narrator of The Prisoner of Zenda is Rudolf Rassendyll, idle younger son of a British noble family. His older brother is the baron with the title. His sister-in-law considers him a ne’er-do-well. Immediately, the reader is charmed by his self-deprecating humor. Even when his life is in danger, he is having fun. He is thirty years old and yearns for adventure. He gets it. And like Charlie Marlow in Conrad’s “Youth,” he is young enough to see any adventure as a lark.

Ruritania is a city-state near Dresden. The novel looks back before Germany was united. Rudolf attended boarding school in Switzerland, so he speaks fluent German. A new king is about to be crowned in Ruritania, so he decides to join the festivities.

His family does not want him to go. Yes, it will be a bit crazy, just like going to Rio during Carnival. But it is more than that. The Baron and Rudolf’s great-grandmother was rumored to have had an affair with a Ruritanian prince. That apparently accounted for the relatively recent appearance of redheads like Rudolf in the family tree. It might considered bad taste to have a suspected illegitimate line of the royal house showing up at such an auspicious time.

When Rudolf arrives in Ruritania, he finds himself in a bigger adventure than he could have imagined. It turns out that Rudolf and the man about to be king are not only cousins but look so much like each other than hardly anyone can tell the difference.

When the king’s jealous brother kidnaps the new king and imprisons him in his castle in Zenda—the king is the prisoner of Zenda—the king’s allies devise a wild plan that will hopefully save the king’s life and disinherit the Black Duke Michael, his evil brother.

Plautus, Shakespeare, and others have used look-alikes for comic purposes. While our narrator never fails to see the humor or irony in his situation, the overall tale is too serious. People are murdered. It is a matter of justice and of life.

Things get further complicated because the king-to-be is betrothed to the beautiful Princess Flavia, a crowd favorite like Princess Di. It is, of course, an arranged marriage, and while each respects the other, the relationship is based more on duty than on love.

Rudolf meets the princess, and she falls in love with him. Oh, and there are others who ally themselves with the Duke for their own purposes. It gets delightfully complicated. I do not think I have enjoyed a swashbuckling novel as much since I read The Three Musketeers a long time ago.

Read it and have lots of fun. And, yes, there is something for everyone. Fans of romance novels would like it, too. The Prisoner of Zenda raises thoughtful questions about the nature of faithfulness and true love. What will Princess Flavia do?

Rupert of Hentzau is the sequel. Count Rupert was a minor character in Zenda, an evil ally of the Black Duke. Here he tries once again to disrupt the Kingdom of Ruritania, three years after the Prisoner of Zenda ends.

This story is told by one of the king’s new advisors, Fritz von Tarlenheim. His narration does not have the charm of Rudolf’s narration of Zenda. Still, he keeps the tale moving. Like many sequels (The Force Awakens anyone?), it is largely a recycling of the first plot. It may not be up to the level of Zenda, but it is still entertaining. Like many sequels, it ties up loose ends. For readers who are interested in Rudolf, Princess Flavia, and the other characters in Zenda, they will find this tale satisfying, or, at the very least, informative.

The title character Rupert of Hentzau is not actually in the novel very much. We mostly hear about him through others. Sometimes we hear a laugh behind a door or momentarily see his face in a crowd, and then he is gone. Although he is the villain and has nothing but his good looks and title to commend him, Rupert may have inspired some aspects of The Scarlet Pimpernel. In many of those stories, we see very little of the Pimpernel: We merely see the effects of his plots and maybe hear a laugh in the background.

One of the minor characters loyal to the king in Rupert of Hentzau is named Helsing. Dracula came out around the same time this did. Was Stoker’s Van Helsing named for Hope’s, or vice versa? Maybe it is just coincidence. Perhaps both were named for Helsingor, the Danish Castle where Hamlet takes place—Elsinore in English—which just means “neck” (of land) or peninsula. It sounds allusive anyhow.

H. Rider Haggard. “Hunter Quatermain’s Story.” Amazon Digital Services, 17 May 2012. E-book.
—————. King Solomon’s Mines. 1907; Amazon Digital Services, 17 May 2012. E-book.
—————. She. 1886; Gutenberg.org, 30 July 2010. E-book.

King Solomon’s Mines is one of those books I wanted to read for years. Since I was doing some Doyle, I got inspired to read some other Victorian adventure stories, so King Solomon’s Mines beckoned.

King Solomon’s Mines is a solid, if slightly imperialistic, yarn. It introduces us to the “great white hunter” Allan Quatermain, who would become the hero of a number of Haggard’s books. It helps us to remember that at the time this was originally written in the 1880s, the middle of Africa was, in the words of Thoreau, still “white on the chart.” Much of the continent was still not mapped or explored by Westerners.

As in Treasure Island or many gothic novels, South African Quatermain possesses a three century old manuscript that describes a diamond mine of untold wealth that the Portuguese writer believes were first discovered under the reign of King Solomon. Indeed, the traditional monarchy of Ethiopia claimed descent from Solomon, though the mines in this novel are well to the south.

Quatermain, Sir Henry Curtis, Captain John Good, and a hand-picked native crew have to trek across a desert (unnamed, but presumably the Kalahari) and climb snow-capped mountains to get the isolated and uncharted land of the Kukuanas. The name echoes the Bechuanas, now called Botswana.

There is a certain exotic quality to the story; e.g., Captain Good falls in love with an attractive and kind Kukuana woman. Of course, there are caves, stone portals, and secret passages that take us to the mines. But King Solomon’s Mines is primarily a survival story.

On their return trip to Natal (this is before the country of South Africa was born), the survivors come across an oasis in the desert where two men, thought dead, have been living for a number of years. The narrator compares their lifestyle to that or Robinson Crusoe. While there is a treasure hunt as we see in Treasure Island, King Solomon’s Mines is not so much a swashbuckling adventure as it is a pure survival story. Lesser men with less experience and skill would have perished.

While the primary conflict is indeed man vs. nature, there is plenty of other action, too. At one point our adventurers find themselves in the middle of a Kukuana civil war. Quatermain’s most trusted African worker turns out to have Kukuana connections.

The men are able to communicate with the Kukuana because these people speak a language related to Zulu which Quatermain and some of the others speak. Quatermain hypothesizes that the Zulu may have originated to the north among the Kukuana. This may be set in Victorian times, but the perspective is African.

“Hunter Quatermain’s Story” is a short story that may be of some interest to Quatermain fans. It is set in London after the events of King Solomon’s Mines, but tells a brief hunting tale that took place before the novel.

Allan Quatermain is an African Natty Bumppo. Like Cooper’s hero, he prefers the uncivilized and wild. Like Bumppo, he is a good shot. And as Bumppo admires manly American Indians like Chingachgook, so Quatermain admires manly native Africans like the Zulu Umbopa.

I have never read a book quite like She. Compared to the other two works by Haggard, it is far more original at its core.

There are certain similarities to King Solomon’s Mines in She. There are a few ancient family letters and an inscribed potsherd that tell of an African queen of unusual beauty and magical power that have come down to Leo Vincey, a recent Cambridge graduate. He and the narrator, his guardian and Cambridge professor L. Horace Holly, sail to East Africa and with a small crew go to the interior to try to discover the lost kingdom mentioned in those ancient writings.

Rather than a desert, their chief obstacle is a vast swamp. When they do arrive at the land of the Amahagger, an isolated people group that inhabit an area unknown to the outside world whose ruins show it was once a great civilization. These people speak a form of Arabic, a language that both Englishmen studied at the university, so they are able to communicate using that language just as Quatermain could use Zulu with the Kakuana.

Compared to the Kakuana, the Amhagger are uncivilized. Quatermain understands their name to mean “People of the Rock,” suggesting the so-called Stone Age. They practice cannibalism—they attempt to kill and eat one of the men in the Holly party. The only thing that restrains them is the authority of their mysterious and apparently immortal and beautiful queen, She who shall not be named, or simply She. They fear her magic, and they know that she has a sense of justice that keeps them in line.

If King Solomon’s Mines is an adventure and survival story, She is something else. She is at its core fantasy. It might not come across as a total fantasy like Lord of the Rings, but that is only because it takes place in the contemporary world.

She who shall not be named tells her visitors that she has no magical powers. She has learned to do certain things, but others have done them before her. She has learned to keep herself young-looking and beautiful though she is two thousand years sold. Still, she admits that she is both human and mortal.

And she is a woman. Holly and Leo both confess they have never seen anyone as beautiful. We also find out that Leo is a dead ringer for an apparent ancestor that She was once in love with. Leo and Holly spend most of their time just observing and trying to figure out what is going on. She tries to win Leo’s love.

The ruined city of Kôr and She are fantastic. There is an air of mystery about both that the two men never attempt to solve. I read that both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were influenced by She. She herself, though morally more ambiguous and human, is a model for Jadis, the white witch. If you read chapters 24 to 26 in She, you have discovered the model for Mt. Doom.

The difference?

Haggard builds his fantasy of what he knows of the classics, Africa, and the Arabs of East Africa. Lewis builds on his knowledge of the classics and fairy tales. Tolkien builds on the Old English, Nordic, and Welsh folklore he studied and loved. I suspect that fans of Lewis and Tolkien will get a kick out of She.

P.S. As noted above, this reviewer used the Kindle editions of these stories. The online reviews posted on Amazon said that the edition of She available from Amazon had serious formatting problems. The Project Gutenberg version of She was fine. There were some minor formatting problems with a few footnotes, but otherwise it was a clean presentation.

Arthur Conan Doyle. Tales of Terror and Mystery. Amazon Digital Services, 2012. E-book.

Having recently read the Sherlock Holmes Stories, why not a stab at other stories by Doyle that do not involve Mr. Holmes? Tales of Terror and Mystery is a collection of some of Doyle’s other stories. They fall into two types: science fiction and mystery. Considering Doyle’s skills, the best ones tend to be those involving some kind of mystery, though in his own day his Lost World was a popular science fiction novel.

“The Horror of the Heights” and “The Terror of Blue John Gap” fall into the science fiction world. In the first, an early aviator discovers monstrous life forms in the sky; in the second, someone discovers a legendary monster in an English cave. These are mostly curiosities today, but they are interesting for their early attempts at science fiction.

Most of the stories are mysteries. The reason that these mysteries were not adopted for Sherlock Holmes is that most of them were written from the criminals’ or potential victims’ point of view. In a few the perpetrators literally get away with murder.

The tale of “The Man with the Watches” is the closest to a Holmes story. It mentions an anonymous London expert who was consulted but unable to shed any light on the mystery as does “The Lost Special.” Both stories involve very clever crimes. Any Holmes or Arsène Lupin fan would enjoy these.

“The New Catacomb” has some echoes of Poe, and for that reason is probably the most predictable of the stories. It also was written from the perspective of a successful criminal. “The Brazilian Cat” is told from the point of view of a victim of an attempted murder. One interesting side note: Lost World is set in Brazil as well. At the time Doyle is writing, the Amazon Basin may have been the least explored and least known part of the inhabited world. After his presidency, Teddy Roosevelt would explore that region. It had the potential that “darkest Africa” had to an earlier generation of storytellers.

“The Japanned Box”, “The Black Doctor,” and “The Jew’s Breastplate” are other stories that are reminiscent of Holmes stories. The first, like some Holmes stories, concerns a mystery which, we discover, is based on a misunderstanding. No actual crime was committed. The other two describe criminal investigations which we like to think Holmes would have solved but which the investigators assigned to the cases do not.

“The Case of Lady Sannox” may be the most bizarre story in this collection. It concerns a clever criminal and a magician’s sense of misdirection. Both this story and “The Beetle Hunter” concern observers who are medical doctors like Watson. “The Beetle Hunter” is reminiscent of “The Red-Headed League” in that a newspaper advertisement seeks a man with an unusual qualification—an M.D. who also collects beetles. As with many of the other mysteries in this set, we see the tale from the perspective of the perpetrator and victim, not the investigators.

Probably the most distinctive tale, one that might have elements of both sci-fi and mystery, is “The Leather Funnel.” A museum piece from the 1600s, a large leather funnel, causes grief to a number of people. Such funnels might have been used in wine making, but this one has a brass rim with a coat of arms and scores or cuts a few inches above the end of the spout. The tale brings in French historical figures, including a famous criminal mentioned in “A Family Crime”: a collected account of a crime committed in eighteenth century Paris that inspired The Count of Monte Cristo and that this blogger translated into English a few years back.

Reading these stories, we can perhaps see why Doyle remains best known for Sherlock Holmes. Having said that, most of these are clever tales on their own, and the best show off Doyle’s trademark ingenuity, even if the criminals get away with the crimes. As one criminal says at the end of his tale about the wife of one of his victims: “I have sometimes thought that it would be a kindness to write to her and to assure her that there is no impediment to her marrying again.” (1588) How thoughtful!

[Reference is a Kindle location, not a page number.]

Robert Lampros. Eleven Floors. St. Louis: JBS-Publishing, 2015. E-book.

Eleven Floors was promoted to me as a young adult book, i.e., appropriate for middle school. While the length and reading level certainly fit that, I suspect that middle schoolers might not consume it heartily. The main characters are college students who are really outside the usual YA orbit (or what one book series called the junior high Magic Bubble).

While the main character appears to be more or less a straight arrow, there is casual drug use and sex, and the audience that could likely relate to it would be college students or college grads.

Because this is a very short novel, it is hard to say much about it without giving much away. College freshman Charles falls for classmate Lynn. Charles is a Christian who likes to talk about God. Lynn listens. Charles likes to go to the quiet tenth floor at the top of the library where there are few people so he can quietly pray and read the Bible. Guess what the eleventh floor is.

Besides a number of Bible verses and a seedy street “prophet” who says the end is near, there are also references to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Unlike The Double Bind or An Authentic Derivative, the allusions are less significant. Charles briefly mentions The Great Gatsby, but Lynn does not leave Charles.

At Lynn’s suggestion, Charles reads “Babylon Revisited,” which may suggest that the college campus is a stand-in for the Biblical and prophetic Babylon. He also read “Jemina,” where a couple who have just discovered one another die side by side. That may be a bit of indirect foreshadowing—but let’s just say no one dies in Eleven Floors, not really.

When Fitzgerald put some of his stories together in a collection called Tales of the Jazz Age, he wrote a brief introduction to each story. He tells us that he wrote “Jemina” when he was still in college. There is a sense that Eleven Floors likewise is a college production. We are supposed to write what we know, yes?

There is a cool image at the end. Imagine the so-called rapture (see I Thessalonians 4:15-17) in which the vehicles or vessels people are riding or sailing in rise with the people themselves who are raptured. In other words, not like Left Behind, where the airplane goes out of control because the pilot suddenly disappears. If you were on a motorcycle or a sailboat, that might be a cool ride to the Promised Land.

This is a different apocalypse from what we usually read about. This is not World War III or a bombed-out Chicago (or zombies). Eleven Floors is more like Fitzgerald’s Babylon: people having careless “fun” in spite of consequences. Rather than emphasizing the devastation of Revelation (which in the original Greek is Apocalypse), it more like the end times of Matthew 24:37-39 “eating, drinking, marrying, giving in marriage.” It is just as biblical, is it not?

Jules Verne. 20 000 Lieues sous les Mers [20,000 Leagues Under the Sea]. 2 vol. 1871; Editions Norph-Nop, 2011. E-book.

In honor of Marie-Laure of All the Light We Cannot See, I had to read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There are actually a few connections that make this novel an appropriate backdrop to All the Light. But 20,000 Leagues is a great story in and of itself.

Jules Verne is often rightly called the father of science fiction. Though we can point to other writings—the author Cyrano de Bergerac wrote about travel to the moon and sun while Verne here credits Poe—but Verne really brought science into fiction to create a plausible if slightly fantastic story.

Today we often think of science fiction of having to involve space travel and hypothetical means of propulsion. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is not that different. It describes underwater travel before anyone had actually done it (1871) with propulsion that at least works on paper and which tells about some things that submarines actually have used since they were invented.

Verne describes the propulsion of the Nautilus, Captain Nemo’s underwater craft, as coming from batteries. All submarines use batteries, whether they have diesel engines or nuclear reactors to charge them. The Nautilus’s batteries are somehow refreshed by salt water and carbon. In Verne’s day, people experimented with batteries using a variety of solutions. Why not sea water? It makes more sense than hyperspace or wormholes for space craft. What is hyperspace anyhow?

There is also a lot of science. Very frequently our narrator, Professor Aronnax, describes the marine geology and life he encounters. The rock and sea floor formations, the seaweed and algae, the mussels and crustaceans, the fish and cetaceans, the seals and seabirds are all described in detail according to each location the boat spends time in. It becomes easy to see how Marie-Laure, who read the novel repeatedly, would learn a lot about sea creatures.

Between Aronnax and Captain Nemo, we also learn a lot about sea exploration and the naturalists who described many of the creatures. It is clear that 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is not only an adventure story but also a research paper. The novel, for example, mentions hundreds of explorers from the sixteenth century to the 1860s. It even discusses the laying of the Transatlantic cables.

20,000 Leagues, for example, mentions Darwin three times, twice in reference to the Beagle voyage and once concerning his theory about coral atolls. Though written after the Origin of Species, there is no reference to Darwinism. Professor Aronnax appears to accept the more traditional idea that fossils were largely laid down by a worldwide flood, though he says he subscribes to the day-age theory: that the days of creation in the Bible refer to eras, not literal 24-hour days.

Aronnax is recruited by the United States Navy to help it investigate reports of a sea monster that has been sinking even ironclad steam vessels. Of course, the monster turns out to be a submarine. Aronnax and two associates—Ned Land, a Canadian harpooner, and Conseil, the professor’s trusty valet—find themselves on a whaleboat separated from the navy ship and rescued by the Nautilus.

Their lives are saved, but they are told by its captain, “Whoever comes aboard the Nautilus must never leave it.” Aronnax has access to a thorough library and an unparalleled collection of sea life—shells, skeletons, skins, algae, and so on. Aronnax makes new and exciting scientific observations, but will he ever have a chance to share them with the outside world?

Back in France, Aronnax was a botanist and lived at the Jardin des Plantes, the garden that Marie-Laure and her father liked to visit.

The adventures do make for exciting reading. Most are realistic in the sense that it is easy enough to imagine them. Many are based on observations made by earlier scientists and explorers. Aronnax and Captain Nemo both cite ancient and modern authors. So they do visit the site of Atlantis. They see many different kinds of reefs. And they encounter monsters of various kinds: giant squid, giant crabs, a pearl oyster two meters across.

Curiously, until they encounter one, Land and Aronnax are skeptical that giant squid exist. In a connection that Marie-Laure might have made from her time in Saint-Malo, Conseil insists that he has seen one. When Land and Aronnax challenge him, he says he saw one in Saint-Malo.

“Where?” Ned asks.

“In a church,” is the answer.

Conseil tells them that there is a painting of one in a church in Saint-Malo.

They go on to discuss how Olaus Magnus, two bishops, and Aristotle all claim to have seen them, and how museums in Montpellier and Trieste contain skeletons of giant squid in their collections.

A few interesting episodes have proven to be impossible. The Nautilus sails from the Gulf of Suez to the Mediterranean via an underwater tunnel. This is set just about a year before the Suez Canal is completed. The Nautilus reaches the South Pole by water. Back then, it was unclear how much of Antarctica was land and how much of it was an ice cap like the North Pole.

One exciting episode finds them under the South Polar icecap and running out of air. Finally, the submarine breaks through the ice cap in a manner resembling a fish jumping out of water. The USS Nautilus broke through the North Polar icecap some ninety years later. By the way, submariners sometimes talk about a breach, where the sub actually jumps out of the water, but they are supposed to avoid doing it if at all possible.

Captain Nemo has developed some underwater suits. They are not unlike the diving suits of Verne’s day except that Nemo uses pressurized air tanks so men can walk underwater without being tethered to an air hose. In other words, these are a lot like scuba tanks. Aronnax on several occasions walks out to view some gorgeous coral, to view an underwater “forest” of kelp, to explore Atlantis, among other things.

One curiosity is the great kelp forest by the Isle of Crespo in the Pacific Ocean. They never go ashore, but explore the sea floor next to this island. The novel, which bases its information on other sources, locates the island in the North Pacific, north of Wake Island and west by northwest of Midway Island. There are no islands there, but there are several descriptions extant which would have led nineteenth-century readers to believe it existed. Indeed, a Wikipedia entry on the Anson Archipelago notes there are two actual islands in this group, Wake and Marcus Islands (they are not close to each other), but most of the other islands are “phantom islands.” The listing even has a map from an 1891 atlas that includes Crespo Island (a.k.a. Roca de Plata) and others that do not actually exist.

The professor would also have us believe that walruses were found in Antarctica. Most of his observations appear sound, but he misses a few.

Much of the tale focuses on the mysterious Captain Nemo. He tells his visitors directly that they speak English, German, French, and Latin on the boat. Nemo means “no one” in Latin, and he tells them that it is not his real name. At one point he says that he was from India, but when he cries out for help, he cries out in French, leading Aronnax to believe that Nemo is a Frenchman. Nemo also appears to harbor a bitter hatred towards a French ship they come across. He also at one point donates some gold to a Greek freedom fighter.

Even though the three men are on board the vessel for a year, they only talk to the Captain. Even the second in command has no name but is simply called the Second. Aronnax does not recognize the language that the crew speaks to one another, so he knows it is something other than the four languages the Captain named.

The Captain and the crew all seem to be content to never go on land. We never find out why Captain Nemo wants to stay at sea, although he suggests he made some people with political clout unhappy. When Aronnax is first investigating the alleged monster sightings, he contacts virtually every seafaring government. He knows that a submarine vessel would not be a complete secret if it were being built in a government shipyard.

Nemo seems independently wealthy. We do find out where at least some of his wealth came from. He apparently built the Nautilus and gathered a crew (maybe Indian?) without drawing attention to himself.

It is also clear that he carries a chip on his shoulder. At times he gets bitter. He seems to enjoy stories of revenge. Maybe a bit like Captain Ahab, he takes predatory sea creatures personally. When they come across a pod of sperm whales, he tries to kill every one. He reminds Aronnax of the sinking of the Essex by a sperm whale and calls the creatures “vermin.” Similarly, he attacks the school of giant squid that they come across. When the cephalopods go after him and his vessel, it is hardly unprovoked.

At the same time, Captain Nemo does have a respect for most sea life. All the food and most of the materials used by the Nautilus come from the sea. The paper they use is made from kelp. The coal they refine for propulsion comes from a mine inside an island formed by an extinct volcano. Ned Land gets tired of always eating seafood, and the three friends are allowed to go ashore on an island off the coast of New Guinea where they get some coconuts and fowl.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a kind of Odyssey around the world. We visit an underwater graveyard constructed of coral. We navigate the treacherous Torres Strait north of Australia. The writer really takes us with him, so we share in his adventure. It is a lot of fun. We learn a lot about the world and its waters. Even if it is not 100% true, it is good fiction.

P.S. In tribute to Marie-Laure, I did read this in French. As with Marie’s Braille edition, the free download from Amazon came in two volumes. Most of the time in recent years I have had to read scholarly things in French. I found that slow and specialized work. That was not the case with 20,0000 Leagues [20 000 Lieues]. It was direct and clear even for a non-native speaker like me. Sure, I had to look up a few words, but it really was worth it. If you have studied a foreign language; try reading some entertaining stories in that language. You will be glad you did.

It has been noted by some critics that All the Light We Cannot See includes recurring images of spirals which all echo the design of the Chambered Nautilus, the sea creature the submarine is named after.

Anthony Doerr. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner, 2014. Print.

This book won accolades from critics all over. The cover of the edition I have tells us that the New York Times named it one of the ten best books of the year. And it received a Pulitzer Prize, not a guarantee that the work is great, but a good sign. Was it worth reading? Yes, most definitely, yes.

Even the title, All the Light We Cannot See, suggests the nature of the writing. There is a mysterious quality to it, yet it makes sense. It is rhythmic, even poetic. The title echoes the famous line from The Merchant of Venice: “All that glisters is not gold.”

Instead of a gold casket, part of the tale involves a priceless diamond said to have originated in Borneo called the Sea of Flames. It has supposed occult powers, making its owner immortal but those around the owner accursed. It has been the property of the Museum of Natural History in Paris until World War II when much of the museum’s mineral wealth is dispersed among the French countryside to avoid appropriation by the blitzing Germans.

As with other such jewels, copies have also been made, so no keeper of gems knows whether he has the originals. One of the story lines tells of the search of a Sergeant Major von Rumpel for this stone. He is one of the few Aryan gemologists in Germany, so he is commissioned to locate valuable gems for the Reich just as others were commissioned to capture valuable works of art for the country.

Von Rumpel may only have a few months to live because of a cancerous tumor. He hopes to find the Sea of Flames not so much for the fatherland but so that he can live on. Ironically, as secularists like Hitler or this character reject the historical faith in God, they grasp at superstitious straws. He who believes in nothing will fall for anything. Alas, when such a person has the power of a Hitler that can devastate the whole world. (There is a brief description of the mustard gas treatments Von Rumpel was given for the cancer. Those reminded this reader of John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud who described in some detail the mustard treatments his son would be subjected to for a similar tumor.)

One of the people who is apparently given one of the stones (whether the original or the copy, we have to read to find out) is the museum’s locksmith, a M. LeBlanc. He has created some unique devices for safely storing some of the museum’s valuables. He also has made a scale model of the Latin Quarter of Paris where he lives with his daughter Marie-Laure, who is blind. She learns her way around by touching the buildings, sidewalks, lampposts, storm drains, and other features of the model and then using it as a map she has memorized to find her way around the city.

When it becomes clear the Germans will occupy Paris, most of the museum’s employees are told to flee. M. LeBlanc and Marie-Laure, with some adventures on the way, flee to Saint-Malo where M. LeBlanc’s eccentric Uncle Etienne lives.

Saint-Malo is an exotic location even for the French. It is in Brittany in northwest France and is an island citadel just off the coast. At low tide, people can walk the causeway to the city, but at high tide, it is completely moated. Its residents also consider themselves a people apart to some degree. We are told that they are first Malouin, then Breton, and finally French if there is anything left over.

Much of the story focuses on Marie. The writing is exquisite. Doerr’s imagery is unsurpassed in prose. Marie’s world is one of touch and sound and occasionally smell. She understands light and color because she went blind at age six, so her ways of visualizing are distinctive.

When they move to Saint-Malo, her father makes a model of the island similar to the one that he made of the Latin Quarter. Twelve-year-old Marie-Laure, thanks to associates at the museum, has also developed an interest and knowledge about mollusks. She can feel the shells and in many cases tell what they are. She is overjoyed when at Saint-Malo she discovers a place where thousands of snails find shelter on the water’s edge.

She loves stories. Her Uncle Etienne reads her stories. She reads and re-reads the few Braille books that she owns. Her favorites are two by Jules Verne: Around the World in Eighty Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The second book is longer, and for a long time she just owns volume one, which she has practically memorized.

Marie’s story is told parallel to the story of Werner Pfennig, a German orphan who is fascinated with radio and electricity. Though the orphanage only has a handmade crystal set, he is able to hear faraway places and broadcasts in different languages. He grows up in the Ruhr Valley. Elena, the mistress of the orphanage, grew up in disputed territory just to the West, so her first language was French. The orphans, then, pick up some French along with their German.

Werner knows that most of the boys in his town are fated to work in the coal mines, where his father worked and met his death. Werner believes that if he learns enough about radio, he can perhaps go into a different line of work.

That is indeed what happens. Locally, he is treated as kind of boy genius because of his ability to repair radios. When he is fourteen, he is called away from his home town to a special military school. Most of the boys there are sons of government or military officials, but some like Werner get scholarships because of athletic or intellectual abilities.

Not only does this military school indoctrinate the boys into Nazi beliefs, it practices them. Weakness is not tolerated. The slow runners and the physically smaller and weaker boys are weeded out. It is pure Darwinism—the survival of the fittest. Lord of the Flies with adult supervision.

Werner is small for his age, but he is quick. And every evening a colonel brings him into his house so he can study radio, trigonometry, and repair broken radio sets. Even among these more elite adults, he has a reputation of being a genius when it comes to building and fixing radios. He ends up constructing a radio direction finder (RDF) that is more effective than the types that the German military has been using.

Eventually, the colonel declares that Werner is eighteen, not sixteen, and sends him to the Eastern Front and then to France to locate and silence partisan and underground radio broadcasts, which he does with great success. We see that eventually he will meet Marie-Laure in Saint-Malo as he tracks down the resistance radio station there which Uncle Etienne operates.

One of the most striking themes, perhaps contrasts, are the descriptions of natural scenes like the grotto of shells or a field of Queen Anne’s Lace with scenes of savagery at the military school and on the battlefield. Since Marie-Laure likes the two adventures Verne about world travel, Uncle Etienne reads to her Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. There is a gorgeous passage from this book describing Darwin’s first awed impression of seeing the Amazon rain forest.

Of course, The Voyage of the Beagle was published in 1839, twenty years before On the Origin of Species, and nineteen before Darwin’s first published article hypothesizing evolution. In Walden (published in 1854) Thoreau speaks highly of “Darwin the naturalist.” That, too, is before The Origin and when the name Darwin became loaded.

This becomes one of the themes of All the Light We Cannot See. We hear the young Darwin, Darwin the naturalist, telling us the beauties of the natural world. We get this through Marie and her fascination with shells and Werner’s friend Frederick who loves birds and observes the living world around him while the bullies are devising ways to intimidate him because he is “weak.”

So then we see the effects of the older Darwin, Darwin the theoretician, giving a “scientific” justification for cruelty and amorality: Orwell’s vision of the future, “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Survival of the “fittest”? Fit for what?

Doerr does understand one thing. While there are books and articles refuting virtually every claim made by Darwin and his disciples, an intellectual case against Darwin in and of itself is not generally effective. It is, as always, a question of the human heart. Pride is such a terrible beast to bring down. What price will it take? Unsettling stories like this that remind us of how a good naturalist got corrupted who knows how just as a civilized country got corrupted by his philosophy—and it is a philosophical tautology, not observable science.

I am not aware that Doerr knew this, but the passage from The Voyage of the Beagle about the Amazon rain forest is cited in Darwin’s own autobiography, which he wrote much later, after he had become an atheist and published his theories. He said that when he saw the majesty of such a creation, that he could not help be a theist, a believer in God. He said he thought then that “there was more to man than breath of his body.” It was only later that he was able to suppress such thoughts. A very significant quotation. “It may be truly I am like a man who has become color-blind,” he noted when looking back on that time. Didn’t Jesus say something about the blind leading the blind?

There is a lot more. The title also suggests the lessons in physics that Werner hears over the radio coming from France. Scientists are learning that light is just a small part of a much larger electromagnetic spectrum we cannot see including the electric waves which operate turbines and electric motors, magnetic waves which create electrical currents, and radio waves which we can send long distance through the air and change into sound waves.

Doerr deliberately includes a contemporary scene with people talking on cell phones, sending text messages, and accessing the Internet to show how the technology continues to change us.

All the Light We Cannot See, though fiction, is quite realistic. Some of the war descriptions are not for the faint of heart. The book does not sensationalize them, but it is direct. We appreciate all the more those who do survive, and what they had to go through to eventually lead a normal life in pursuit of happiness.

All the French, except perhaps one very old woman, seem to be existentialists. Was that way of thinking that prevalent in France? Even before the war? Perhaps so, but I am just asking that. I do recall reading Georges Bernanos’ La Joie (Joy) and Journal d’un Cure de Campagne (Diary of a Country Priest) or Andre Maurois who were contemporaries of Camus and Sartre and hardly thought as they did. Eh, well.

Doerr’s narrative technique is a little different, and some readers may find it unsettling. The chapters are very short and alternate among various characters, usually between Marie or some other French person and Werner or some other German. On top of that, the chapters wander all over time. Even the section headings which give dates really only apply to the first chapter in that section, and not always even then.

Still, there are enough context clues that the reader can usually clearly figure out where and when the episode is taking place. And together, the chapters do progress in such a way that we see that the main story begins in 1939 right before the German occupation and ends in 1944 after the liberation of Paris, but it has a good deal of prologue and some epilogue as well. It all works together. All the Light We Cannot See is a pièce de résistance if not a chef d’œuvre.

Linda Sue Park. A Single Shard. New York: Houghton, 2001. Print.
—————. A Long Walk to Water. New York: Houghton, 2010. Print.

Both of these books by Linda Sue Park tell the story of orphans who overcame great odds, one in twelfth-century Korea and one in contemporary Africa. The author presents both stories in a bare, realistic manner, yet they are meant to inspire.

A Single Shard is the story of Tree-Ear, who lives under a bridge with a lame homeless beggar named Crane-Man. The village where they live is known for its clay which is used to make very distinctive celadon pottery.

Tree-Ear manages to get a job, for no pay but with a good meal, as a go-fer for Min, the potter whom Tree-Ear considers the best in the town. He mostly cuts wood for the kiln and digs clay for the pottery. He learns about taking the raw clay and refining it.

The details about ceramics and the life of beggars are carefully and lovingly set out. Tree-Ear sees how only about a fifth of the items taken to the kiln are good enough for Min. But he will learn also—as the title suggests—even a shard of high quality has value.

While most of A Single Shard is set in Tree-Ear’s seaside village, the boy at one point has to make a long overland journey to the capital city. (This is a few centuries before Seoul is even founded.) The story focuses on art but includes adventure.

The ending reminded me of other stories where the protagonists had to overcome great odds but left behind something of great value or beauty. While the tale is quite different, I could not help thinking of The Cloister and the Hearth. Similarly, I was reminded of Amos Fortune: Free Man, a book of the same reading level featuring a protagonist who overcame long odds.

A Long Walk to Water focuses on Salva, one of the Lost Boys, victims of civil war in southern Sudan in the 1980s. His story is primarily one of survival—guerillas, crocodiles, lions, desert. It is intense and not for the weak of stomach.

The story begins when he is eleven. While school is in session, his village is attacked by some soldiers. His teacher tells all the students to escape to the bush: the village means certain death.

So he goes east for months, crossing savanna, the Nile River, and desert, eventually making it to a refugee camp in Ethiopia where he stays for six years. When that camp is closed down, he becomes a leader of a group of over 1,000 boys from the camp who make a trek to a camp in Kenya. While slightly fictionalized, A Long Walk to Water is based on the true story of Salva Dut.

Interspersed with Salva’s adventures are brief descriptions of a girl named Nya in a Sudanese village in 2008. She spends half of most of her days getting water for her family. Curiously, some of her experiences of extracting water from clay soil are similar to Tree-Ear’s as he extracts impurities and water from the clay he works with.

Both of Mrs. Park’s stories have very moving conclusions. These are sophisticated young adult books—relatively short with main characters in their pre-teens or early teens. A Single Shard won a Newbery Award, which places the audience at late elementary or middle school. But do not be fooled, older readers will be moved as well.

Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection. Amazon.com. 15 March 2015. E-book.

It has been a long time since I read any collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. This one is billed as complete. It does include a few stories that are often overlooked such as the two Holmes stories narrated by Sherlock Holmes himself rather than Watson. Since there are over 50 stories in this collection, it would serve no purpose by reviewing them all, but this collection is fun.

Like someone’s favorite TV show, there are a few episodes in which it appears that a very similar plot has been recycled. Doyle seemed to like backstories with complicated family relationships. People from foreign countries (i.e., not England) seem to have a penchant for crime. Still, Holmes’ aplomb and cool temperament while on a case are very entertaining. Watson always seems dazzled, even when he contributes a lot to the solving of a crime.

Not all the stories investigate crimes. There are other mysteries occasionally. For example, in “A Case of Identity,” Holmes is hired to try to make sense of an affair of the heart. No actual crime was committed, but there is certainly questionable behavior.

Some stories I remembered from previous readings years ago, but most were somewhat new to me. As with many mysteries, part of the enjoyment is trying to figure out the mystery before the sleuth reveals the solution. In “A Case of Identity,” for example, I did figure out the motive for the unusual circumstances, but the actual method was still something of a surprise. And in so many of the stories, as in true life crimes and mysteries, money is a motivator.

I had read The Hound of the Baskervilles at least twice in the past, and I did have a vague recollection of the plot, but it was still fun to read. That story had a little bit of everything, and probably deservedly is considered Doyle’s best. It is a page-turner with a number of surprises and terrors. I remembered some things about the hound and about the Baskerville family, but there is a fascinating supporting cast such as the escaped criminal Selden, the Baskerville’s housekeeper, the local entomologist and his sister, the country doctor whom Watson naturally takes to, the shepherd boy who spies on Watson, the missing boot. The plot truly does thicken.

There are four novels or novellas in the Holmes corpus. Three are well known. Besides The Hound of the Baskervilles, there is A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four. A Study in Scarlet was the first Holmes story, where Watson meets Holmes and shares an apartment with him until Watson’s wedding.

As a kid, I recall enjoying The Sign of the Four, probably because of its exotic Indian characters and backstory. The woman who becomes Mrs. Watson is Holmes’ client in this one. Re-reading it made me think of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone which also involves a theft of Indian jewels.

The fourth novel I do not recall ever reading before. The Valley of Fear may have been the best mystery, but it had a weakness. The main mystery is solved in about the first third of the book. It was a very clever story. The murder victim and his widow had come to England from America. He apparently was involved in some criminal activity in Chicago and the West, but had gone straight and was trying to start a new life in England.

About half of the novel after the mystery is solved tells a discursive story about the victim in America before he left for Europe. It adds little to the story and almost seems purposeless.

The backstory in A Study in Scarlet is similar in that it tells of the three main characters in that story when they all live in the American West before coming to England. That is tenser and quite entertaining. It reminded me very much of Zane Grey’s The Riders of the Purple Sage with its Mormon vigilantes. It also relates more directly to the mystery Holmes is trying to solve.

The ultimate purpose of the rambling backstory in The Valley of Fear, without giving away too much, is to introduce the reader to Professor James Moriarty. There is not much more than a mention of him in this story, but Holmes expresses his belief that the professor is the Napoleon of Crime who is behind most criminal activity in England.

Moriarty is really only a living character on the pages of one story, namely, “The Final Problem.” The Valley of Fear was apparently written to lead us to Holmes’ “death” in Switzerland. Four other stories mention Moriarty in passing, but always with the understanding that he is dead. Holmes returns in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” so that tale tells the Reichenbach Falls story from the detective’s point of view. Three other later stories mention Moriarty briefly.

In other words, Moriarty is perhaps the most powerful criminal Holmes encountered, but Moriarty does not figure in too many stories. He is no Brainiac or Joker.

“The Five Orange Pips” also has a victim who came from America to straighten out his life. In his case, he belonged to the Ku Klux Klan and wanted to break free.

Holmes also comes across as a rather kindhearted. If he was working on a case apart from the police, he frequently let the perpetrator of the crime go. This was not always true, but he seems easily persuaded that the criminal has learned his or her lesson and will not be a repeat offender. In some cases—Irene Adler, for example—it is easier to simply let them leave the country, so at least they will no longer be bothering any Englishmen.

“Silver Blaze” was worth re-reading. I did recall the basic details about the stolen horse, but I had forgotten there was a murder and some other unusual goings-on. “Silver Blaze” has the line which has become a cliché in recent years about “The curious incident of the dog”:

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

This collection claims to be complete with 57 stories. Other collections have 56, apparently there are some questions about the provenance of one. It also claims to be unabridged.

I recall being skeptical in the seventies when the Seven Percent Solution came out as a novel and then as a film. In the seventies the hippie drug culture was still something new, and here was a claim that the very brainy Sherlock Holmes used cocaine recreationally. I just figured it was from someone trying to cash in on hippies.

My experience with Holmes stories had been mostly from a collection entitled The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes. Some of those stories I realize now had been edited to pare down some of the chitchat but also to get rid of the drug references. We also know that some American versions of the stories were abridged by American publishers.

This collection does contain several stories which describe Holmes’ use of cocaine. Watson expresses his concern over this in a friendly bedside manner. There is also a sense that Holmes may be manic or bipolar. When he is not on a case, he gets depressed easily; however, that could also be caused by mere idleness.

Because this is a Kindle edition, there is one thing lacking in this collection. None of the drawings which contribute to the stories are included. I seem to recall a drawing in “The Sign of the Four” of the letter the Four signed in one edition I read. The most glaring omission is the dancing men in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men.” These were simple stick figures used in a secret code. The original had the various messages using the code drawn in the text. Perhaps a reader could solve the mystery with Holmes. In this edition there is simply a blank spot where the pictures should go.

As is often the case with low-cost and public domain e-books, there are a handful of typographical errors, nothing major. The only one that puzzled me was in The Hound of the Baskervilles when Holmes referred to a “bogie hound.” An Englishman would have recognized immediately that it should have been “bogle hound.” A bogle in England is a ghost, goblin, or scarecrow. It is a very precise word in this instance.

I found one thing a bit curious myself. Three times in all the stories do we see Watson’s first name. Twice it is John. Once it is James. We are told in the Wikipedia entry at the back of the book that Doyle had a friend named Dr. James Watson. Perhaps in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Doyle was thinking of him. He is John in the subtitle of a collection and in “The Problem of Thor Bridge”—an effective story in which this reader confesses that he missed a couple of significant clues.

Still, have fun. Relax. Be amazed. Sherlock is guaranteed to entertain and get his readers to think.